by Mick Farren
At first we didn’t push our luck, and we were reasonably careful not to completely antagonise Mr Showbusiness or give the landlord tangible reason to bar us from drinking there. As time passed, though, and as always happens in these endeavours, circumspection gave way to confidence, and confidence grew and escalated to a point where we just had to test the envelope’s bursting point. The rupture came after our guerrilla appearances at the Artesian Well had been going for five or six weeks. We had started making our own small mark. A limited word had got out that something highly untogether, but definitely out of the ordinary, was going down in this hitherto dreary pub. More long-haired malcontents had started to show up, guys in old army coats and CND badges and girls in black Marks & Spencer rollneck sweaters and lots of Boots mascara, presumably to see what nonsense we were up to. An art student called Rob, who played very good blues guitar, had begun to come by, and Alex Stowell joined us on harmonica when appropriate, and frequently when not. A guy called Mel Isaacs, a friend from student parties, brought a five-string banjo and some obscure but hilarious cockney radical songs, such as ‘Greedy Landlord’ and ‘The Man Who Waters the Workers’ Beer’.
Although we weren’t getting paid anything – all fiscal returns going to ukulele-strumming Mr Showbusiness – we were being bought enough drinks to put us in the drunkenly arrogant frame of mind that we could get away with anything. In this instance, what we tried to get away with was Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘High School Confidential’, a song that’s harder than it looks when you are drunk, because Jerry Lee wrote the stop-time sections like a minefield, and the words come so fast that, if you miss one, the whole vocal collapses like a line of dominoes, as indeed it did. After this débâcle I took it into my head to do ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’, Dylan’s monstrously depressing dirge about the South Dakota badlands farmer who goes broke to the point of starvation, and then shoots his wife, his five children and himself using seven shotgun shells that he’d bought with his last dollar. It was delivered with artery-throbbing Johnny Walker Red passion, in the early form of what an eminent rock critic would, years later, describe as my ‘hallmark monotone’. I compounded the crime by playing my own dreadful guitar.
When I was through all eleven verses, the place was silent. They weren’t booing, they weren’t pissed off; the audience was stunned by what had come to pass. No, they hadn’t liked it, and they didn’t like me, but for a while I’d absolutely meant it. Idiot-savant method acting had kept the crowd sufficiently off-balance to stop the boos and catcalls, or even someone dragging me bodily away. Too shocked to be elated, but realising that I’d certainly had an effect, I walked off. Mr Showbusiness quickly walked on and, without acknowledgement of what had just happened, launched into ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight’.
Almost immediately the landlord cornered me. Pub landlords tend to come in two sizes, the wide and expansive, and the narrow and suspicious. He was one of the latter, with eyes too close together, a greasy comb-over and a damp Woodbine perpetually in the corner of his mouth. He removed the cigarette, indicating that what he had to say was a matter of some gravity. ‘I think this has gone far enough, old son.’
‘Far enough?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘So what are you telling me?’
‘I can’t have anything like that again.’
‘Anything like what?’
‘You know what I mean.’
The phrase ‘you know what I mean’ was his counter to every probe to make him explain himself, or define precisely what was upsetting him. I shrugged. ‘So, you’re banning me?’
Narrow eyes peered at me distrustfully. ‘No need to go that far.’
Now he was trying to hedge his bets. He wanted me out of the place, but the unholy crew of which I was a strong cohesive factor had actually brought him a whole new crop of drinking punters, maybe more than Mr Showbusiness attracted. He was trying to have it both ways, and I knew I had him.
‘So what are you saying to me? I can drink here, but I’m not allowed on the stage?’ I nodded in the direction of Ralph, Pete, Alex and the others. ‘You think they’re going to go for that?’
‘Listen, I’m not an unreasonable man . . .’
The truth was that he was a totally unreasonable man.
‘I’m not unreasonable, but there’s got to be limits.’
There have?
‘We’ll just see how it goes, okay?’
Again I shrugged and handed him back his authority. ‘Whatever you say. You’re the governor.’
He leaned close, now that his position was restored. ‘That’s right, I am, and I’ll be keeping an eye on you.’
For the rest of the night I was thoughtful. What I didn’t realise was that a scene had just been played out that would be repeated over and over again for the rest of my life. Someone who believed he was the ultimate authority loathed, or felt threatened by, what I was doing. The silence that had greeted me after losing myself in the song wasn’t conventional approval, but I’d had an effect. If what you had to say for yourself didn’t meet with instant mass approval, was that any reason to give up? The hell it was. I wanted more than anything to perform, again and again, until they either got the message or finally killed me, but it would have to be totally on my own terms. It wasn’t even a matter of principle. Compromise simply wouldn’t work.
After the envelope burst, we went on going to the Artesian Well, but it wasn’t quite the same. I lay low for a while, gradually easing my way back onto the stage and then being warned off yet again by the landlord when I went too far. It rapidly ceased to be fun, however, reduced to the level of a predictable and pointless game. It was time to move on. Again I was getting frustrated. I now had a good idea of what I wanted to do, but how to go about it was a mystery that remained to be solved.
I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside
‘We are the mods! We are the mods! We are, we are, we are the mods!’
‘We are the mods! We are the mods! We are, we are, we are the mods!’
‘We are the mods! We are the mods! We are, we are, we are the mods!’
‘We are the mods! We are the mods! We are, we are, we are the mods!’
Paul, Beryl and I sat on a bank-holiday weekend on the balustrade on Brighton sea front, with the grey-green English Channel at our back, facing the Metropole Hotel, the pubs and souvenir shops, and watched as they streamed past, all parkas, anoraks, neat hair and wild amphetamine eyes. Paul and Beryl both lived in Brighton, and I was down from London visiting. We weren’t the mods, and we hadn’t been rockers since at least 1961. We were something else entirely. But what? As three scruffy non-participants in boots, old army shirts, tight dirty jeans and long unkempt hair, we defied categorisation, but we were asked to define ourselves a hell of lot that day. A group of rockers lumbered up to us with beleaguered hostility, and brown ale on their breath, tougher and more massive than the mods, heavily outnumbered, sideburned dinosaurs, but more than ready to beat us bloody if we proffered the wrong response. ‘Are you geezers fucking mods?’
We shook our heads. ‘No, mate. We’re beatniks.’
‘You mean like Bob Die-lan?’
‘That’s right.’
‘All right then.’
They moved off in search of more culturally reprehensible targets. A while later a swarm of mods rushed up, tense behind Smith, Kline and French Drynamyl (once Purple Hearts, but by then French Blues), nervous tics and slight flecks of dried foam at the corners of their mouths. ‘Are you geezers fucking rockers?’
We shook our heads. ‘No, mate. We’re beatniks.’
‘You mean like Bob Die-lan?’
‘That’s right.’
‘All right then.’
They too moved off. Although we had to perform the same crude catechism a number of times that day, it seemed to have been clearly established in the minds of both sides that we ‘beatniks like Bob Die-lan’ had a protected, neutral status in the tr
ibal combat. Certainly no one beat us up, and although repeatedly questioned, we were allowed to remain unmolested on our bit of wall. When the police arrived and the street fighting turned from internecine to anti-authoritarian, Paul, Beryl and I slunk off to some bohemian refuge like the Lorelei Coffee House, the El Sombrero or the dank dungeon cellar under the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. Paul and I, in theory, had nothing against mixing it up with the constabulary, but one invariably ended up in jail, and we had better things to do with our time that bank holiday. This was the mods’ and rockers’ fight, not ours, and we felt justified in leaving it entirely to them. We were also well aware that the Brighton plods were less culturally discriminating than any of the mods or rockers we encountered and would fail to recognise that we ‘beatniks like Bob Die-lan’ were not a part of the general mayhem.
Over the years literally millions of words have been written about the politics, metaphysics and symbolism of the mod/rocker clashes of the early Sixties. I wrote a few of them myself, and I see no reason not to quote some directly right here. The following are from the book Watch Out, Kids, published in 1972. Although the style may be ponderously countercultural, I still pretty much stand by the sentiments.
Alienation between the two behaviour patterns was obvious from the beginning. The conservatism and casual brutality of the rockers, and the mods’ sharp, aggressive, pilled-out hostility and flash, made each side an amalgam of all that was worst by the other side’s standards.
It seemed as though youth culture had turned in on itself. It was impossible for the two facets of the culture to exist side by side without conflict. Youth, forced to draw on society for its examples, had inherited the age-old weakness of any oppressed people. It had given vent to its frustration in a display of internal violence and demonstrated that, no matter what degree of expertise in the production of artefacts it may obtain, a culture without an ethic or a philosophy cannot survive intact.
Youth, through rock and roll, had discovered its bodies and developed a lifestyle based on sensuality and the pursuit of pleasure. The rockers had gone no further than bogging down in a narrow conservatism, while the mods had devalued and impeded further discoveries through becoming entangled in complicated consumer rituals and sense-dulling drugs. If there was to be no further experimentation, the culture had to stagnate and the generation would just perpetuate the social insanity it had rebelled against.
The basic thesis of Watch Out, Kids was that the function of the yet-to-arrive hippies was to furnish youth culture with an ethic or philosophy. Whether they did or not is, of course, the subject of continuing debate. What isn’t in debate is that the hippies did appear in the wake of the mods and rockers to provide a third subdivision of Sixties youth culture. Oddly, it was only when writing this account that it occurred to me how those mods and rockers back in Brighton seemed instinctively to recognise Paul, Beryl and me as this third tribe even before we knew it ourselves.
Look at His Legs
The women might have screamed as they had screamed at Elvis, Mick Jagger or the Beatles, but they were too overawed. Control was now expected of them. They were supposed to have grown out of pre-teen hysteria, even though Bob Dylan clearly had the charisma to invoke such a response. He stood alone in the spotlight on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, backed only by a tall wooden stool holding a glass of water and an assortment of harmonicas, looking businesslike, urgent, concentrated, in his own way as controlled as the crowd, snapping his knee and leaning forward slightly between the verses of the songs as he strummed the acoustic Gibson, moving the instrument closer to the second-guitar mike. May 1965, and I was seeing Dylan for the first time and wishing more than ever that I was him.
Although Dylan hadn’t brought out the rock & roll band that had featured so iconoclastically on Bringing It All Back Home, and hadn’t given the folk traditionalists anything overt at which to become upset, this was definitely not Woody Guthrie. The ghosts of electric rock ’n’ roll circled the Albert Hall’s high domed ceiling. With the first indication of the big hair still to come, a leather sport coat and tailored jeans with just enough flair to hang correctly over his Beatle boots, the man on the stage, although solitary and solo, was nothing short of a full flying rock star. He didn’t gyrate and hardly even gestured, but if confirmation of his status were needed, beyond that the Beatles themselves were installed in the royal box, Jane (my love of the moment) provided it by leaning close enough so that I could smell her hair and her perfume. ‘Look at his legs. He’s got such fabulous legs.’
Much has been made of the tour one year later when Dylan ‘went electric’. The reception accorded to the Band, the cry of ‘Judas!’ and the disgruntled mass walkouts have all become the stuff of both rock ’n’ roll history and rock ’n’ roll legend, but even though the entire English tour was chronicled in Don’t Look Back, few critics or historians seem really to have noticed the writing that was on the wall as early as 1965. Dylan started the show with ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’, but it seemed rushed and perfunctory. As a retroactive single, released after being out on album for eighteen months, it had become a UK hit, but Dylan seemed to be playing the song out of commercial obligation rather than conviction. Sure, the times were changing, no question, but Dylan was changing right along with them, if not ahead of them. The signals had already been clearly transmitted that he himself was no longer a ‘beatnik like Bob Die-lan’.
On landing at Heathrow, Dylan had conducted a press conference while holding a large industrial lightbulb as a Dadaist prop. The message – ‘keep a clear head and carry a lightbulb’ – had left the pop correspondents of the national dailies confused and hostile. They might have been ready for some young and earnest left-liberal folk singer, a callow and tousled Pete Seeger, but nothing had prepared them for an obliquely surrealist Elvis from inside the Gates of Eden, protecting himself with everything from mocking humour to the relentless savagery he exhibited in his one-on-one interviews with Horace Judson of Time, and with Laurie Henshaw for Disc and Music Echo. What also confused the media was that Dylan had developed a full-scale teenybopper following. Anxious young women lurked outside his hotel and waved frantically if he so much as appeared at a window. To a media already stung by Dylan’s repeated bouts of hostility, this provided more ammunition with which to denigrate his work. A snotty Maureen Cleave demanded, ‘Do your fans understand a word you sing?’ Only British snobbery could have accused an artist of having fans too stupid to understand him and make it sound as though it was all his fault.
Other indications that Dylan was definitely no longer casting himself as Woody Guthrie came not from the media but from the general London rock & roll grapevine. Stories circulated about how he was holding court at the Savoy for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, particularly John Lennon and Brian Jones; how Alan Price of the Animals was his constant companion when the circus travelled up north; and how Dylan had arranged a recording session with John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, one of the hottest club bands at the time, but it had broken down in a drunken shambles. We also heard tales of how, although he had Joan Baez stashed at the hotel, he was also putting the moves on Marianne Faithfull and the famous breasts of Dana Gillespie. Still only in his mid-twenties, Dylan was being lauded by the hipsters of the world like the Second Coming of Jesus Christ on a Harley. He had the contemporary rock elite at his feet and was running around with some of the most admired women in the world. As Ian Dury would remark years later, ‘There aren’t half some clever bastards.’ Even when it became clear that the trip was driving Dylan to dope and dementia, it still seemed like one hell of a desirable ride.
Hearing Dylan on record had obviously given me an approximate idea of the power of his voice, but to hear it live yielded a few surprises. The first was how much it varied in intensity, volume and emphasis from one line to the next, rising from a reflective whisper to a near-shout when making his point, and negotiating an emotional range that stretched from a contagious sadness to a furious braying venom. It
may sound a little overblown to call his delivery Shakespearian, but Dylan had a command of one-man drama that enabled him to hold the capacity audience of some 7,000 in the palm of his hand. The given intelligence was that Bob Dylan couldn’t technically sing. Certainly, by the dictates of bel canto, his voice was abrasive, of limited range and he had a whole bag of tricks to avoid exactly pitching a note, but, in context, one could screw bel canto and the ice-cream truck it rode in on. Seeing him for the first time made one thing absolutely clear. Dylan was among the chosen few whose voices were capable of profoundly moving those who heard them. Conforming to no accepted standards, it was innately compelling, a jolt of voltage to the nervous system that sent thrills down the spine.
After the show I joined the crowds milling out of the Albert Hall and along Kensington Gore towards the nearest pub, with my head spinning. The folkies had it totally wrong, and everything that I’d theorised while listening to the records had been confirmed. If they hadn’t been so limited in their perspectives, the folk of the Left would have known what the kid was up to and been saved from their own bitter fury when he double-crossed them a year later by strapping on his Fender and doing it with the Hawks, later to be known as the Band. The implication was that by turning on so-called folk music, Dylan had turned his back on the people. As far as I was concerned, rock & roll was the music of the people. No question.